


she who remembers

by nightmarechild



Series: athanasia [2]
Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Ancient Greece, Angst, Character Study, Deviates From Canon, Drama, Established Relationship, F/M, Gen, Historical References, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Past Relationship(s), Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:21:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21842098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightmarechild/pseuds/nightmarechild
Summary: This would not fix it, I knew. Forcing my way to a place I had not earned, to rifle through its souls and take the one I wanted - like a fox stealing an egg. This alone would not make the world right, or my life suddenly easy and free. But I could not always explain the things I did.Kassandra, half a god. Kassandra, who has lived too long. Kassandra, who wants something back. Part character study, part drama/romance. Post-Odyssey, underworld shenanigans.
Relationships: Brasidas & Kassandra (Assassin's Creed), Brasidas/Kassandra (Assassin's Creed), Kassandra & Myrrine (Assassin's Creed)
Series: athanasia [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1574221
Comments: 26
Kudos: 90





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _she who remembers_ is intended as a follow-on to _[the warmth on the mountain](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16587014/)_ and is heavily based on characterization and events from that story, but should be legible as a standalone should you not have the bandwidth for an 80,000-word longfic at the moment :) 
> 
> Note on canon divergence: while this was inspired by the Fate of Atlantis dlc, the Isu are not a thing in my universe, nor are any events from the "Legacy of the First Blade" dlc.

Who am I?

You will not get the same answer twice. 

The long-leaper, the far-thrower. Snake-strangler. Breaker of masks, she who surges, a hunter, a diver, a soldier of fortune, a lover of all things and all people. I have been called a god-child and a petty hireling, a bringer of peace, famine, war, bounty. I am the blood of Gorgo and the grey-eyed goddess, or I am another fanciful poet's creation. I have been called Kassandra of Sparta, of everywhere and everything, of nothing.

All of these are true - or have been. If you want to classify me, to make sense of all the things that make me up, you will not. More stubborn men have tried. It would be easier to think of me as an amalgam: a hash built from all my loves and losses, a set of cares collected from those who have touched my life. Like a jealous magpie, I have taken those souls and made a shell of them, because I could not bear to lose even a single one.

Core among them was my mother, to whom family was the first and only thing. Then bright Phoibe, whose joy gave meaning to my vicious youth, shrewd quiet Philonoe who wanted her son to hold a stylus instead of a spear, and the slave-general Nemesis, whose power and intention I had always admired, who burst out of her chains like an angry titan and saw in me a strength worth sharing. There was the clever king Agesilaos, Agnedike the physic, Hypatia the polymath, and the ferocious lovers Pelopidas and Epaminondas, who had finally brought down the rotted rafters of Sparta-that-was - each of them with a mission or mandate all their own. 

Then there was his: to place love ahead of all else. To help those who could not help themselves, to never begrudge them the circumstances of their birth. To rail against evil when peace was just a step away, and to never look away from ugliness.

From that patchwork purpose I shaped my life. I swore to build a ship, muster a loyal crew, explore the world, to hear the stories as they were told by bards and poets in distant lands. I tried to sow peace where I went - for that was the greatest of all my pilfered beliefs - but so often it seemed the world tended toward evil, as iron sought a lodestone. To push it towards virtue sometimes felt impossible. I feared it required a patience beyond mine, a goodness the world no longer possessed.

I think that, in the end, is what put the idea in my head.

\---

I spent some months weighing how I would do it, as a thief might plan a burglary. It was said that certain rivers or pools, dominions of naiads and hydriads, looked down through the thinnest parts of the earth into the dark of the gods. Although I had thought augurs and oracles tiresome in my youth, the doors they opened had been known to connect people with their dead. Or perhaps I could do as Odysseus had at the bidding of his beloved Kirke, and dig a trench in the lands of the Kimmerioi, offering libations of milk and mellow wine and tempting the dead with thick black ritual blood - but that would not do. I sought something more than a fading conversation or weeping embrace.

In the end I chose the way that would let me keep my own voice, my own strength and steel skin. There was no entrance to the underworld, it turned out, no special place where our two realities resonated together or brushed against each other like sea and shore. The path was everywhere, woven into the air itself, and it could be opened by a simple alloy: a drop of divinity and single-minded purpose. 

Warnings came from everywhere as I did it. From nymphs in the trees and earth, voices on the wind or silver-eyed divines in their mundane disguises. I was not god enough for this, they assured me. Sister, we swear you will not survive it. The shock of it will melt your mind out of your ears.

I reached into the air. I found the edge of the veil, and ripped it open, and walked through the hole in the world. Wrong, of course, as my petty kin so often were: I needed no chaperone, no soul-guide or psychopomp to help me choose my footholds. I was not dead. I only wanted something back. 

The feeling was at once distension and compression, vertigo and absolute focus. It could not be compared to any other. All that had been and would be stretched out before and behind me like a great endless corridor, and I lost all sense of solidity, of time, proportion, perspective, the place I took in the cosmos. Through deep valleys I walked, across mountain-saddles and dark sludgy oceans, and a mortal mind would have split in half at what lay at the end of that eternity’s travel: a great expanse, dull and white as a salt-flat, lonelier and more immense than the plains of Thessalia. 

This would not fix it, I knew. Forcing my way to a place I had not earned, to rifle through its souls and take the one I wanted - like a fox stealing an egg. This alone would not make the world right, or my life suddenly easy and free. But I could not always explain the things I did.

There was no dispelling the haze that hung over the home of the dead. It addled and confused me; it made weeks into minutes into eons. Perhaps time did not exist at all here. I think I drifted for some time: in the fields, in the colorless city, in that middle-place where grew the immortal lilies of the gods, or in the dark cold light of Tartaros - wandering, as a shade might, entranced by the strangeness of the place. Hundreds and thousands of souls I saw, spending their days in bleak contentment: throwing bone dice and eating transparent food that was never cooked and yet never ran out, wearing their burial shrouds and grave-gifts over their pale gauzy shoulders. There was no commerce here. No contests or races or rites or marriages; everything seemed to be built for mundanity. 

In the arms of a great white mountain sat a high acropolis, built in a familiar style. I was drawn to it by the marble god-statues, the modest temples I knew from my homeland where they liked their buildings small, their words smaller. I made my way there in the ash light, feeling in my heart that unerring sense of _home_ , and found faces I knew: friends and victims, people who had feared or loved me. To look at each was to tumble back through my history, to inhabit the person I had been when I knew them.

You could tell so much by their shape and eyes. Which of the dead were still fresh, and which had passed long ago from the world's memory. I could see which of them had died in hatred or ignominy, for their faces were bent and distorted, with bitter scowls that turned into funeral masks in my periphery. The loved and longed-for had eyes bright as sunflare and voices that rang like ritual bells. Their tears came freely, and their faces gleamed with something more than serenity. Sometimes, the moment I saw them, their features brightened, shot through with life, as if the surge of my grief enlivened them. 

When at last I found my mother, she smiled and explained that curiosity. Shades were made of memory, she said, like smoke given shape. They rang in answer, but never on their own. The hearts of the dead stirred only at remembrance by the living.

I embraced her. If I focused all my yearning into the touch of our arms, I could feel her as she had been in life - warm and strong, with wiry corsair's muscle across her back and a fierce possessive love in her grip. She had come here in the form that meant most to her: hard-lined face and small weathered frame from the precious years she spent with her children. I remembered the slow agony of seeing her go, but knew I should be thankful that she had stayed with us well beyond the stretch of her natural life. My brother had thought it luck or tenacity, the sheer strength of her love for us - but I knew it was godtouch. For a time, she had been the war goddess's favorite plaything. 

We spoke for a while. More than I had intended, knowing how long I had already lingered among the shadows and bones of my life. There was so much she had missed: the rise of kings and empires, the building of walls in the north and the slaying of tyrants in the south. I had fought a hundred armies, had fallen in love a dozen times. Finally, when our tears were spent and I had assured her my brother’s happiness had survived her death, my mother touched my arm and said: “My love, my lamb - please, tell me. What are you doing here?”

My throat closed in shame. I could not tell her the truth. Perhaps that meant I knew, somewhere deep inside, how mad a thing this was.

“Nothing in particular," I said. "Stretching my divinity, testing myself. Demigods have walked here, and some mortals besides - why not me? You know how I love to chase fables.”

My mother only laughed, and said, “No.”

Blood rushed through my face. In the spring of my life I would have closed like a steel trap on her fingers and snapped, _you think you know me, mater_ \- but a different harmony had grown between us in the last years we had been together. I could not deny how often she was right. 

“I am looking for someone," I said.

“I see. And why are you looking for him?”

“Why?” My voice caught. She had surprised me. “You know why, don’t you, _mater_?”

“I have a guess. But I want to hear what you say.”

It felt like a punch. A threat hissed against my judgment. I reached out in panic, and instead of honesty, I found something weaker. “What _I_ say? What - do you think it will be selfish, or stupid?”

“No, lamb.”

“My reasons are good, and they are my own. You could not understand - you lived out your time, and more. You knew happiness with your family. You made your mark on the world, and had time enough to grow tired of it. But he could not - ”

I heard the petulance in my voice, and did not finish. 

“So now you wish to correct this injustice?” My mother spoke quietly and calmly. “To restore to him the life he was owed, the time your brother took from him?”

Dark sour guilt tunneled through my stomach. “Yes.”

“What if you cannot find him?”

“I will look until I do.”

“What if he will not leave?”

“Then I will break the shackles that keep him here.”

My mother’s eyes lay placidly on me. I looked down, so I would not have to meet them. After a moment she came forward and reached up to touch my face.

"You have always taken what you wanted," she said, her palm on my cheek. "My Kassandra."

She said it with the barest love, with a perfectly neutral understanding. But something in it made me bristle. "I have had things taken from me, too. Everything is taken, sooner or later. After all this, I deserve a boon - don’t I? Don't I deserve at least one of those lost things returned?"

"Lamb," my mother murmured. "I think you deserve a home. Some place you feel safe, and more and new loves each day. I think you deserve to know all the secrets of the world - to see it change and break and rebuild itself. That is the gift your blood has given you. I don't think you deserve anything this place has to offer you."

However kindly it was meant, it suffocated me. All her love and hope had hardened my heart. I looked through her, for I was past listening, and did not care if she knew it. 

My mother sighed. Bowed her head in defeat, or disappointment. Then she pulled me down to her, so that she could kiss my forehead, took my shoulders, and turned me around. I followed the line of her arm and finger out past the edge of the acropolis, over the far mountains where lay the great burning fields of the tortured.

"Seek your answers,” she said. “I cannot stop you - few could. But do not stay too long. Do not gain a taste for our boundless food or careless existence. Remember, lamb: you have lost a little of yourself, but you are not dead."


	2. Chapter 2

Sometimes, in my darkest moments, I had wondered: when I arrived here in the underworld, if I arrived at all - would he find me? Or would I be only a shade to him, clear and grey and unremarkable? Another face anonymized by death, which blurred and swam as the world above discarded their names, their deeds, their virtues, if they had any… 

His eyes found me across the silver distance, and I knew it had been a fool’s fear. We had endured too much to forget. I had loved him too wholly to think so little of him now.

The life we had shared splintered through me. A torrent of words, of concepts, of all the deep raw things I had felt before and during and after: trust, duty, warmth, fragility, beauty and heat and care. Fighting like dancing, synchrony, a bewitching concord. Secrets and sly smiles, a feeling like holding my heart in my arms. Thinking I would do anything, speak any curse, fight any foe, to keep him safe and whole. 

Then: masks. Puppets and snakes and the dark. A whisper of a dream of a future, dangled so close I could feel the autumn leaves and taste the sweet wine. Dead hands, fingers through hair, holding him as dusk turned to night turned to dawn, listening to the shorebirds cackle as they fed on the remains of that last great battle in the north.

He watched all of it pass through me. His face was the clearest I had seen: neck to jaw to thick dark hair, so sharp and solid that I could see the edges of his eyelashes. But that did not surprise me. 

“Kassandra,” he said. We stood at opposite ends of a long field, but I heard him as if he stood beside me. His voice clutched my name like talons, holding it long and tight - and then he turned, so that the dark light struck him differently. My stomach dropped to see what covered his face: a splash of blood, angled like artery-spray from a fresh kill, like deep red flight feathers across his cheekbones.

He had done this purposely - to show me what? I did not know yet. I was to him as he had been to his dearest Lagos, forever a step behind.

A thousand thoughts fought each other in my throat. I told myself: speak from the heart. Do not try and play games, it will only make him laugh. So I swallowed the tremor in my voice and said, “I am glad to see you, Brasidas.”

He laughed anyway - a soft, startled, precious sound. It was the mundanity of it, I think, as if we had passed each other in the street after a summer away. “Glad. Yes, I am too - and a hundred other things. But we will start with glad.”

So quickly he gave the silence back to me. I scrambled for words, each one like ripping up tree roots, as if I had forgotten how to speak. “I am… I have been looking for you. It took me more time than I wanted. I have been here for - well, I cannot remember exactly how long - ”

A flash of alarm passed through his face at that.

“I expected to see you above,” I went on. “In that grey city in the mountains, with the other shades. I found my mother there, and some of your generals…”

“The acropolis. I know of it. Truthfully, I only see the place in passing.”

“Why are you here?” I looked at his tunic, his bare shoulder. He wore no armor or weapons, only a simple wool cloak and thick-soled sandals made for hard terrain. “Not to fight, surely. You are more dressed for a symposion than a war.”

It drew a chuckle from him. “Thankfully not. The dead have little to say about the meaning of life.”

The distance between us ached like a bruise. I wanted to run to him, to focus him into sharp relief and take him in my arms. I could ride there on the breath of my divinity and be there in an instant - but I was afraid. It had been so long, and I did not know where we stood. Would we fit into each other as we once had? 

“Come,” he said, and extended his wide rough palm in invitation. “It’s unpleasant out here.”

I followed him for some time, watching his careful footholds as he picked his way through avalanche hills and rock-ribbed mountain passes. We did not speak a single word to each other, and after three thousand paces I lost count of my steps. On earth the air might have crackled with bird chatter and wailing wind; here there was only a thick stifling stillness, heavy as a burial shroud. All I could think of was the vast silence between us - what it meant, and how I might break it to tell him why I had come here. 

At last his pace slowed. We had come to a mountainside, grown over with grey lichen, where the cliff hung like a heavy brow over the dark eye of a cave. With his face shaded, his shoulders still and calm and carefully neutral, he led me inside.

I had expected to be blinded by the dark after so long under the sky. But this was the underworld, and there was no sun to leave black patterns in my eyes. Immediately I saw the size of the place, the hundred naphtha lanterns that filled it with low ashen light, and how it stretched far back like the twisting insides of a conch, forever curving out of sight. It seemed he had made a home of it: here were the cold remains of a fire, threadbare blankets and a thin bedroll woven from undead rushes - the accommodations of a man accustomed to harshness.

Then I saw the objects that lay beside the blankets. The wine cups, the notes I had left him. Woodworking tools, _petteia_ pieces, a sweet little bear-shaped inkpot that had belonged to his friend Lagos, the silver bear's breech pin he had worn in the council halls of the north, the leather cord I had used to bind my braid, the map we had made to plot our ludicrous escape. The dozen little trinkets I had gathered in my delirium, clutched to my chest, and placed on his pyre so I would no longer have to see him wherever I looked.

“I should thank you for these,” Brasidas said, seeing where my eyes lingered. “It is common for souls to arrive here with coins, jewels, gold bars or the accolades of their rulers - things less than worthless to a shade. I am one of the lucky ones, keeping the things that meant most to me in life."

My voice struggled out as if through rocks and sludge. He would not have minded if I cried, but I felt I owed it to myself to keep my dignity. "No weapons, though. No shield or crimson cloak. Have you managed to leave all that behind, at last?"

He spread his hands with a smile, as if in celebration of their emptiness. “Like I said. I am one of the lucky ones.”

Already images had started to bloom in my mind. Little pieces of moments we had shared, motes of laughter and safety. I would have these things again, I realized, with a building eagerness. We would walk together on the earth, and finish all that we had left undone. I would see the color of his smile, the sweet brown of his eyes in the sunlight. Against the wall I noticed a soldier’s satchel - a modest kit, packed with supplies, as if in anticipation of a long journey - and my stomach churned with giddy excitement. Did he know what I had come here to do? 

Then a sound came from the belly of the cave that caused every muscle in my body to snap taut. A rising howl, louder every moment: the long wailing cry of a baby.

The one awakened others. Dozens, hundreds of little voices, climbing each other as if in a contest of grief, crashing and mingling and making a hyena's den of the cave with its endless echoing corridors. The sound burrowed into my brain. On their own my hands went to the weapons at my hip, though I was not sure what good it would do against this horrific new enemy. I did not know how to fight the misery of a dead child. 

Before me, a look of wincing apology crossed Brasidas’s face. Another curiosity: though the cacophony seemed enough to deafen me, he did not have to speak loudly to be heard over it. “There are families here - did you notice?”

I had not noticed.

“It is not rare to see shades wandering together with their children,” he went on, “although their love does not resonate as it did in the light. If a child is lucky enough to die with their parents, then they all go off to live their eternities together. Slaughtered in the same house, the same instant, even with the same blow - that is enough to keep them together in death. But these unfortunate souls…” 

He touched a small round object at his feet with his toe. My eyes had slid over them before, but now they focused into relief: small dark stones strewing the floor, geometrically perfect, each about the size of a Spartan shield. With a small motion Brasidas set the thing gently rocking. The caterwaul softened, and I realized in horror that each of these little stone eggs, each of these rough cradles, held a child. 

“Orphans of war," he said. "They die alone, in whatever cursed way. Killed in raids or attacks, taken as spoils. Or they die of exposure, left alone in an empty house without food or care after war has taken their parents - I am not sure. Either way, they did not cross the veil with those who loved them. So they come here, to this nothing-place, to cry and cry until - ”

Brasidas paused, and shrugged, and fell silent. A sick fog sat in my gut. I felt certain he had learned this from Lagos, in the brief time we knew him: saying these ghastly things with a terrible placid pleasantness.

“All right,” I said. It came out garbled and pitiful, so I coughed and began again. “All right. I understand why they are here - but not why you are.”

“To work.” His eyes were cautious, his tone even. As if his words were chosen to straddle some fragile line between truth and mollification. "To find families that have been ripped apart by war or violence, and bring them their lost children.”

“But there is a better place just across the mountains, a place you could live out your eternity free of such suffering - I have seen it! Why would you choose this instead?”

“I did not choose it.”

A smile pulled at my mouth, and melted away just as quickly. “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “That sounds - it sounds like - ”

“Punishment,” Brasidas said, amiably, and waited in silence for me to understand.

I remembered my thoughts from the journey here. It was so like him, I had theorized as I walked the scarred battlefields, the endless slopes, the wailing rivers where cackling spirits would drown the wicked until the end of the world. Those cities in the mountains had been so barren and sterile, the fields sad and unsown. There were no pieces to move, no puzzles to solve. The man I had known would not be satisfied with such a life. He had chosen this place for himself, I was sure, to escape the unbearable dullness of the dead.

"The gods have put you here, then." When I spoke, my voice felt far away. My pulse seemed to dwarf me. “To labor, and to suffer, in payment for some crime on earth. Is that what you mean to say?”

“To labor, yes, but I do not know that I would call this suffering. Truthfully, the work is only half my sentence.”

I nearly asked a fool question: what is the other half? But my mother’s words rang in my memory. _The hearts of the dead ring in answer, but never on their own_. They persist, she had said, but stand still, unable to change or grow or heal. l remembered Brasidas’s eyes in the council-hall of Akanthos all those decades or centuries ago, bright and broken, and I remembered how he had touched my face in wonder - how he had not even given me a chance to explain myself before absolving me of every wrong I had done him. 

That was the man that had come to the underworld. Not the proud warrior, the cunning spy, but someone who had found something precious and lost it just as quickly. 

“What sort of existence is that?” My throat ground like spearpoint on stone. I had lived that horror, too; I had lost him and been lost myself for months afterward. I could not imagine being frozen in that moment: forever a woman with a chasm inside her, a love-sized hole that could not be filled. “How can you bear staying here, remembering all that you remember as if it were yesterday, bound to this rotten work?”

The sharpness of my voice gashed the air. The child at Brasidas’s feet began to bawl. With practiced gentleness he bent down to scoop it out of its stone cradle, and when it came into his arms, when it lay its head across his chest and soaked his tunic with its crying, my heart tore to see how the rumbling of his voice turned those tears to sighs. " _Rotten work_ \- listen to you. I have caused so much evil in the world. It is only fair that I try to balance that now. Besides, there is something poetic in it, isn’t there?” He looked down at the child-shade in his arms, and the hurt in his eyes breathed like coals. “So many nights I spent fearing and craving this, always too afraid to ask. It seems only just that I spend eternity in a mockery of it. Playing this role in a life I will never have with you.”

I could hardly speak from disbelief. Could I kill him again, I wondered, to cure him of this lunacy? “What is this evil you say you have caused?”

“If you can recall the life I led, I believe it will become clear.”

I did not bother to think too long. I pulled together the things at the front of my mind, and spoke them as they came: “Curiosity, valor, respect, forgiveness, rebellion. Love of people, and patience with flaws. Competence. The inability to hear praise,” I added, seeing how he flinched and turned away, “and an abundance of pride, I suppose, at the worst times.”

" _Hubris_ is what my generals called it.”

"That word was made to soothe the vanity of the divine. Your arrogance concerned no gods."

Brasidas chuckled through his nose. "I suppose I can take your word for that."

I held myself too still. In life it had lain between us like a scab - the secret of my provenance. I had laughed to distract him, railed against any sign of worship with a proud and public scorn. But a mind even half of his could see the health of my skin, the gold and gleam of my eyes in the pallor of this dead world, and suspect the truth.

“Absurd,” I breathed, my tone as even as I could make it. “This is absurd. I have seen many sinners here already, Brasidas, and as many punishments. Do you want to hear them?”

He smiled. Of course I would tell him, no matter what he said.

“King Ixion, father of the centaurs,” I said, tallying on my fingers, “bound spread-eagled on a burning wheel, laid open for his lust. The cannibal king Tantalos, who bears a hunger he will never satisfy, and the Danaides, who committed a massacre on the orders of their father and now obediently carry water to a bath they can never fill. Minor fates, too: negligent fathers who will never again be seen or spoken to, murderous sisters made to slaughter one another for eternity. Those sentences, I grant, had some poetry to them. But this - ” Recklessly I gestured to the labyrinth around us, that nightmare nursery. “This is unearned.”

“Passionately claimed, for someone who did not live my life.”

“I lived it with you, for close to a decade. I saw as much of it as I needed to know who you were.”

“Then you knew I was a thug, a lackey. A bringer of violence, an obedient follower of vicious orders.”

“Obedient is not the word I would have chosen.” 

“No? I had all the things I needed to do good: power, influence, the privilege of a strong body and an old family name. I could have used those to pull up the roots of war in Sparta; instead I marched to it. I spoke in the only language I knew.”

“And where was this ruinous guilt then? Why did I not hear a word of it when you led your men at Methone, or repaired Sparta’s broken front on the sieged plains?”

Brasidas looked down, favoring the sallow earth with a frown. “Because I did not feel it then. When you have gone all that way, spent your life on a single purpose, what choice is there but to look forward? The alternative is too much for a mortal to bear. To recognize the harm you have done, and admit that you have been wrong.” 

The baby in his arms began to fuss, reaching out from its threadbare swaddle-cloth to grab at his beard. The chorus of cries from within the cavern had abated; perhaps all his other undead wards had wept themselves to exhaustion. “Death gives clarity to a life. It grants perspective, brings your deeds into perfect focus. I have seen each lie, each boast and little manipulation, each time I put my spear through a throat and said it was for good. I challenged the laws of my life, bent the bars of my cage as much as I dared, but still I was a killer and a belligerent.”

“You should not be here,” I said, dully, dumbly. I had no pretty words to throw at him, no new evidence to support my claim, but it felt important that I keep making it. “It’s not right.”

“I was a warmaker, Kassandra.”

“A role you were born into. A role you could not discard.”

“I dragged bloodshed behind me wherever I went.”

“Of course you did! What else would you have done?” An edge of frenzy had begun to cut into my brain. I wondered if this was the fate the underworld had constructed for me: to bicker forever with my dead lover who seemed convinced of his own vileness. “Would you have refused to fight? Run away with me to the ends of the earth to drink wine and hunt with long spears? Would you have left your people to fight alone in an endless battle? More would have died if you had not acted. Thousands. You did not create the war.”

"I am tired, Kassandra.”

"No, you are dead. I can see how you might have confused the two." 

"I am happy where I am."

“That is impossible.”

“Yet I feel it.”

I felt ready to put my fist through the dark stone wall. "I love you."

The mild shock that passed through his eyes nearly made me laugh. I had not said those words to him until the last days of his life. To me, _love_ had been a word of permanence, a future word, and I had never trusted us to have one. Now I knew: that is what made it so important to say.

"I swear to you," I said, "I love you as I have never loved another person, but I am not asking. Say your goodbyes, if you have any. We are leaving."

"No," he said, simply.

A sledge to the back of my head could not have surprised me more. A snow-cold silence passed between us, and for an instant I wondered if I had misheard him. The gall of it, the insanity - the notion that this was fair, that it was merited - or that he would _choose_ it -

I was angry, embarrassed, confounded. So many things at once. I wanted to shake him, to shout myself raw. I wanted to argue. _You are right_ , I wanted him to tell me, _of course you are. I am good, and do not deserve this torment; how could I have forgotten?_ I wanted to seize him by the back of his neck and hold his body to mine and kiss him with all the heat and sorrow that had lived inside me since he had gone. I wanted to grip him, to envelop him, to make him quiver in my hands. I wanted to cry. 

All these conceits chased each other through my eyes, so immediate that I had no chance to hide them. He watched them all in bear-eyed silence.

I had to say something. So I said: "What?" 

Brasidas retreated to the wall of the cave, to a line of round hollows chiseled into the stone, and in one of them laid the child he carried. When it was safely in its silk-swathed cradle, he lowered himself to the ground, bent forward, and touched his nose to the floor. Pain made him wince when he made to bring his arms up above his head; it must be the wound my brother had given him on the burning strip of Pylos, eternally unhealed. Finally he came to rest on the dirt in a pose of worship, of submission, as if beseeching some horrific temple icon.

I had seen cities fall. I had seen monuments destroyed, obelisks felled, great forests of oak brought low by storm or blaze or some fool's notion of progress. This was worse.

"Goddess," he said gently, that whispering gravel. 

The word was like ice water down my spine. It brought to mind the cold of the north, of Chalkidike - a feeling that sat under your skin and stung until you had scratched yourself raw to dig it out.

"Stop it," I said. "Stop. Get up."

"Divine Kassandra, who runs toward battle," he said. "Kassandra the city-saver. Kassandra, ward against evil. The long-leaper, the far-thrower - "

For an instant his gaze flashed up to mine, and I saw the fierce bitter love in it: a break in his vile performance. "The honey-eyed, the fire-hearted. Kassandra, who holds all that I am in her hands."

“Stop,” I said again. It was meant as a request, but it sounded like a command, and also like pleading.

"Why?" He lowered his head, and the stance was replaced: that terrible compression, a pose for the small. “That is what you are, isn’t it? Goddess, or part of one. I know it now, though I did not in life.”

His words crept up my legs. I had spent so long with that truth hidden away inside me. Always Brasidas had looked away from it, dulled the blade of his perception long enough to allow me my modest existence, my precious mundanity. Now I felt that safety slipping through my fingers like sand.

“Does it gall you?” he asked. “To stand so plainly over others - over me? It is a very godlike thing you do, scorning choices that are not yours. The wants of others have always been a frustration to you, another stubborn will to be bent. Your way, or no way at all - it has always been like this.”

Anger surged through me like floodwater. Some part of me recognized: this is what he is saying, Kassandra, this mulish fury is your undoing. Do not let it take your composure, your poise - but it must have been the mortal in me. 

"That is a lie,” I hissed. “A cruel lie. I lived as humans do, with all those limitations, those faults and frailties. Sometimes it felt I was defeated at every turn. And above all I listened to you, Brasidas - when did I not?”

"Until now, I have never truly wanted something you didn't."

“Tell me what you want, then.”

“I have told you. Leave me here. You are alive, so go back to your world of color and light. Spend no more of your years in the past, wanting back a hero that does not exist.”

My mouth hung open. _I have a guess,_ my mother had said, and in my mind I had imagined all the terrible things she could say next. _You are guilty. You are lonely. You want your plaything back._

"If you do not want worship," Brasidas said, evenly, "then do not act as if the decision of a mortal is beneath you.”

I could have listened. Could have taken his words and folded them into myself and tried to see the sense in it - but I was, after all, alive. I did not have the clarity of the dead, that perfect perspective that might have been a mirror to my actions.

For a blinding instant I shed my earthly skin. The veil that hid me from the world fell away, and I let my godhood bear me toward him: a movement that to a mortal would have seemed like a blink or strike of lightning. I brought the web of my hand to his throat, took him up off his knees and to the wall of the cave where his head and back met rough limestone. I suspected the gasp that came out of him was more out of habit than true distress; the dead did not breathe. 

"I am stronger than you,” I informed him. “I do not need your permission. I could put you on my shoulder and take you from this wretched place, and you could not stop me."

"I know." His voice was rough with strain. Where a pulse might once have leapt under my fingers, I felt only the echo of a life. "Why do you want me to go so terribly? I have told you I want to stay. Kassandra, I wonder..." 

I flinched. You could always feel it behind his words, when he had his hands on something. A secret to prod, a mystery to unravel. It had been one of my favorite things about him. 

"I wonder," Brasidas said again, thoughtfully, "is it because you feel responsible for my death?” 

The softness of his words was a dagger between my ribs. I tightened my grip. He braced for it, as he would have taken a fall or pin, and I had to swallow down all the things it called to mind.

“Perhaps you grieve,” he said, “that I had only a fraction of a life, where you have had multiples. That I came here before my time because of your brother - because you could not stop him. Because when he came for me, what he really wanted was to break you open.”

“Yes,” I snarled, feigning impatience, though my voice broke. “That is what I feel. Does that please you?”

“Do you think I would not have died early if not for you? You think I was not responsible for my own life, and the way it ended? You do me a disservice. You take my power away.”

He was becoming bold now. He came forward, challenging my grip, pushing me back on my heels. Suddenly I did not have the strength to hold him. 

“And now,” he said, “you would renegotiate my fate. You would correct my afterlife. To deliver justice, or to ease your guilt - fine. Perhaps this is how it must be. After all, Hyakinthos of Sparta did not choose the manner or time of his death. The maiden Kore did not choose to become Persephone, mistress of the dead. Europa did not choose, nor Leda, nor Io. Why should I?"

It was too much to bear. To be placed next to my kin, those petty and selfish gods who could not see outside themselves, who thought of mortals as passing amusements, as pretty mayflies or mules for halfling children… 

I recoiled from myself. My feet took me away, step over step, a stumbling retreat. In terror I turned, seeking any kind of escape, eyes clawing for the un-light of the dim underworld sky. Brasidas must have followed, for a moment later his hand closed on my shoulder. Without thinking I traced that strength, calculated its center; I spun and struck and crooked my ankle around his - a wrestling trick, a movement as natural to me as blinking - and brought us to the ground.

It maddened me to touch him. Memory seemed to cling to him like fog on a winter lake: in his shoulders I felt those close hot nights in Arkadia under sandstone dawns, on his lips the wine we had drunk at the foot of Athena’s temple in the heart of Sparta. In his tongue and fingers and the hard angles of his hips lay my own pleasures, taken so freely in the days before we had known real strife. I did not have to focus to feel him beneath me. 

“Tell me again,” I said, choking on the past. His breathless chest heaved against mine. “Tell me what you want. Choose now, and let me honor it.” 

His eyes stormed with splintered grey lamplight. I was defeated, exhausted: even stronger, swifter, with gold divinity in my veins, still I could not win! We panted there, resonating, fracturing each other with our grief. I held him there for a long heart-stopping moment, waiting for some kind of spark or sign - and then, when I felt close to bursting and made to release him, my name rumbled up through him as if it had been aching to escape. 

A tremor climbed my spine. I tried to speak, but Brasidas did not let me. His hands lay rough and hot on my neck. With burning defeat in his eyes he curled his fingers in my hair, dragged me down to him, and crushed my mouth to his until we both tasted gold ichor and ghost-blood.

Perhaps he had gone mad, too.


End file.
